Because the help was only to get me away. Out of the house. Out of the city. Out of the country I was starting to guess.
Back to Cole.
This time I'd hang on.
On my third day in the house, Vincent ordered me to work with Kie on the whole hair, makeup, shoes thing. To be honest, she was my best chance to get it right. Kie was beautiful, even with the new cuts he'd put on her cheeks, the ones still seeping clear fluid. They had to hurt.
He also put me on a strict keto diet to lose what he called an unsightly fifteen pounds. I didn't think I'd lose that much weight, especially not during the amount of time I intended to stay stuck here.
Biding my time. Waiting for an unguarded window that wasn't three straight stories down to concrete.
My weight had never been a hang-up. I was good enough for Mark to fall in love with and more than good enough for Cole to want and obviously good enough for Vincent even, unless he went around kidnapping girls he found ugly.
I didn't want to look like Kie. Her boobs were firm and beautiful, he'd done a lovely job on them, but they seemed to sit directly on her ribcage because there was nothing to her. No muscle tone. No muscle. No deposits of fat where women are supposed to have them. I liked my muscle. I'd worked hard for it.
When he ordered us to work together, I decided to take the bull by the horns. Kie being the bull.
"There's a trick to these things, right?" I asked before she'd even turned around from staring after him with belligerence that would have gotten anybody else slapped.
Kie turned back, mid-growl, then saw me holding the shoes out by two fingers around the heels. She just looked curious. "Put them on." Then she realized what I was asking and said, "There's no trick." But she was laughing as she watched me put them on and begin hobbling across the room toward her in my sweats and heels, affecting the wizened hag curl to my body to keep from toppling over. "You look ridiculous."
"That's good," I said. "Because I feel ridiculous."
Little by little, through the afternoon spent in a dining room with a view through picture windows of a city I didn't know, Kie taught me to move fast while seeming to take my time and how to take steps in such a way I really was taking my time – in order to balance and not look like some crabbed and haunted old witch shuffling along – and walking upright with some speed. I thought it was probably one of the most temporary things I'd ever learned. Working undercover I’d picked up on things and became someone else and learned entire lexicons and emotional display arrays only to abandon them and forget I'd learned them when the assignment ended.
Put me back in normal shoes and I'd forget how to do this stilt walking thing in no time.
When I stood upright, I felt like I was far taller than I was in the shoes, like I'd suddenly shot up to six-four or something, rather than adding four inches to my five-six. Sometimes it felt like I was falling. Sometimes it felt like falling would be preferable to standing even another minute with all of my weight pitched forward onto my toes. Then I just wanted to fall forward, hit the ground, and lie there.
In between, when the pain in my feet was too much, she'd plunk us both down in front of salon mirrors and explain the finer points of makeup to me. I'd never known there were so many things you could do with plain old makeup.
When she finished with me, she'd done whore. "Oh, thanks ever so," I said and heard Kie giggle for the first time. It wasn't a sane sound but it was mirth. I'd take what I could get.
I didn't ask her where we were. I assumed everything I asked her or told her would go straight back to Vincent. So no questions about cities or countries or about who the men he'd been having dinner with were or who she liked to hang out with here. Or if she wanted to show me the ropes, more than Vincent had ordered.
Or maybe literal ropes. The kind we could tie around something, tie the other end around our waists, then out the window and a walk down the side of the building to disappear at least long enough to find out what country we were in and head back to the American embassy.
If Kie would even go.
When Vincent was in the room, watching, making pointed suggestions, either his voice loud and frightening or his favorite weapon, a heart-shaped rug beater that left its design imprinted in the flesh of my ass. He'd taken to correcting my style and form with it, but otherwise there was little that was remarkable about the days other than how much I really didn't give a shit about hair and makeup. Or shoes.
I was learning, though. More than either of them thought. I was learning the patterns of the household, how many guards, at least in the places I could see them, and what their shifts were, which of them was semi-human and which existed for a chance to hold a girl down on an exam table and watch her stripped and examined.
I learned how Kie and Vincent moved around each other, purposeful as old enemies. I already knew Kie was mentally ill. From what I'd seen during the time I was searching for Cole in San Francisco because I couldn't find him in Vegas or even find the scene, there were plenty of healthy-minded people who simply liked kink. Before being plunged into it, I'd never thought about it at all, other than the occasional foray into wanting to ask Mark to spank me or those rare times we drank a little too much and put my handcuffs to interesting use.
What I learned was the shame that society so often put on alternate or deviant behavior was deeply felt and absurdly pointless. It wasn't that I could say "it harms no one" because the person asking for it was being harmed, though usually only to an agreed upon extent. In good, safe, consensual play, it was always only to the agreed upon extent. That freed the masochist up to scream and yell and protest and sob and sometimes that was the whole point and sometimes they spent the session asking for (and sometimes getting) more, harder, do it.
Other times they cried quietly at the drop of a whip and endured to the end because it was what they'd asked for and safe-wording out wasn't going to happen.
It could be a release – emotions set free in those who didn't usually allow themselves to feel or had some block within. When your emotions were mocked in some other life situation, when it was dangerous to have them because it made you a target or made you soft and soft wasn't safe, letting go was cathartic in the extreme.
They were hardly glowing, original insights, but they were all new to me, coming in as I had on a world I'd known nothing of and had learned fast.
But the thing is, there are situations of shame. Of degradation. Of humiliation. There are non-consensual activities that some enjoy and others are horrified by and there's such a thing as extended ongoing assault and that's what Vincent was into.
The other thing I'd never understood – and I had, from time to time, dipped into the literature of BDSM, curious without very much understanding before my fall from grace in Seattle – was that the humiliation could be fresh every single day and that it could be brought to bear by someone on the outside just the same way as society heaped it on.
So society says the sight of certain body parts outside certain places is so wrong that people skip routine medical exams rather than submit to those parts being seen. I wasn't immune to this. I was private about my body and its functioning, my mind and its imaginings. That's why with Jesse in the Brotherhood clubhouse I never stopped thinking that the bedroom where he fucked me was just off the kitchen where his soldiers sometimes parked their bikes to work on. Where they gathered to read mechanics magazines (and one of them, philosophy books I wondered at). Where they drank beer and sometimes talked about their families and sometimes talked about bitches, and where they could easily hear everything going on in the bedroom.